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Snowmit writes "In May 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline presented a paper called 'Drugs, Space, and Cybernetics.' The proceedings of the symposium were published in 1961, but, before that, an excerpt of Clynes & Kline's paper appeared in the September issue of Astronautics magazine (issue 13), entitled Cyborgs and Space [PDF]. Aside from a mention in the New York Times, that's is the first time the word appears in print. This month is the 50th anniversary of that article. To commemorate, a group of writers and artists have gotten together to create 50 Post About Cyborgs. Over the course of the month, there will be essays, fiction, links to great older material, comics, and even a song. We're going to talk about Daleks, IEDs, Renaissance memory palaces, chess computers, prosthetic imagination, Videodrome, mutants, sports, and maybe the Bible. To kick things off, Kevin Kelly wrote this essay arguing that we've been cyborgs all along."

Rhymes with coined, meaning to create a new word. A cybernetic organism is a life form constructed, like a Terminator, while an augmented one, in my opinion, is naturally born, but has later had something like a robot arm attached.

Late reply : ).I am almost sure qoined is a spelling mistake.As other posters have pointed out a cyborg is based on an organism, a born, living creature cybernetically enhanced. The Terminator would be a biobot or biochine, a biologically enhanced robot or machine.

A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism.

A Terminator is merely a ROBOT covered by an organic covering. The covering is no more significant than if the robot were just wearing clothes. It's just covering. The machine underneath is not a living organism and never was.

Just because James Cameron doesn't know his technology, the word cyborg has been debased beyond all recognition. It's probably a waste of time to try to correct it any more, but I like wasting my time.

We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Except for Master of Transhuman. We gonna kick THAT bitches ass to the kerb.

A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery.

Okay, so they took a human, and REPLACED all the squishy internals with machinery. How is that NOT a cyborg ???

A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism..

So... if you wear a wristwatch, and prescription lenses, or contacts... or even sunglasses, and... carry a cell phone, or wear a belt to hold up your trousers, or have a pin in the ankle you damaged as an adolescent, or are an amputee with a prosthetic, or any combination of these or similar enhancements, you are no longer merely human. You, sir, are a cyborg. Halo save us all.

A Terminator is NOT a cyborg. A cyborg is an ORGANISM which has been ENHANCED or even REPLACED by cybernetic machinery. The key is that the original entity was a living biologically based organism..

So... if you wear a wristwatch, and prescription lenses, or contacts... or even sunglasses, and... carry a cell phone, or wear a belt to hold up your trousers, or have a pin in the ankle you damaged as an adolescent, or are an amputee with a prosthetic, or any combination of these or similar enhancements, you are no longer merely human. You, sir, are a cyborg. Halo save us all.

Well I wouldn't go that far. Actually I always thought of it as having a not easily removable piece of technology that replaces or enhances a piece of your body. So I wouldn't say that wearing glasses makes you cyborg, that is more using a tool to enhance your vision. If you had implanted lenses so you could see then that is more along the lines of cyborg. amputee with prosthetic definitely counts. I would consider myself one having my insulin pump connected to me. It always gets a bit interesting on the fr

A lot of people have argued that is true but I don't agree. A cyborg is an organism which has had an organic part completely or partially replaced by a mechanism. So the first items you suggest (watches, eyeglasses, etc.) wouldn't qualify, but, yes, a guy with a prosthetic arm is a cyborg. A guy with a pin in his ankle is a gray area - I'd say not so much because the modification is so minor and not so much a replacement of existing organics. If he had a fully prosthetic ankle, you could say he was a cyborg

As a loyal slashdotter I have carefully read the summary and nothing else. If I understood TFS this isn't about the paper itself... and the New York Times and not this article was the first to use the word in print. What is this celebrating again? The second time cyborg appeared in print?

The idea is interesting, and it's certainly true that if all technology were removed, including stone and bone implements, humans would have a much tougher time surviving. But there are areas of the world where we could survive without handmade weapons or fire. We're not very well-equipped for such an existence, but we're not completely helpless.

One argument the author makes repeatedly which makes no sense to me is the notion that cooking provides an "external stomach" which pre-digests our food. There are some foods that are unsafe to eat without being cooked, because of disease that they could be carrying, but in general very little of what we eat MUST be cooked, or is even harder to digest without cooking. Raw meat is just as nutritious and as easily digestible as cooked meat, it just doesn't taste as good (with some exceptions). Raw vegetables are often more nutritious than cooked vegetables.

There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".

No we don't. At least, not as a species. Just because I can't drink the water in Mexico without getting horribly sick doesn't mean that 'homo sapiens' broadly construed as a species can't. Exhibit A being the indigenous population that survives just fine drinking the water there.

So, your entire argument boils down to this: Thanks to the sanitation implications of high density settlements, we need fire (and by extension technology) to survive?

Never mind that those high density settlements were only ever possible because of technology?

Even with those links, the inability to drink the water has nothing to do with humans, and everything to do with sanitation in dense settlements--which would collapse anyway without technology. The OPs point was that humans can survive without technolo

Much rather drink the delicious organic water from the Cascade [wikipedia.org] brooks than the crap that flows out of metropolitan taps. Would you rather drink a few drops of deer piss, or do you enjoy putting pharmaceutical waste, fluoride, heavy metals, and who knows what else into your body?

Have you ever wondered why the rates of things like allergies are skyrocketing? People don't expose themselves to nature. I grew up on a farm, and I can tell you with certainty that no farm child in had hay allergies. In fact, allergies of any kind were rare.

Isolating yourself in a city drinking nothing but treated water in a perfectly sterile setting is weakening you, slowly making you dependent on that environment for survival. That's just reality, and honestly it would almost certainly be healthier f

Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.

If it's actually spring water, come directly from being filtered through hundreds of feet of rock, you'll be just fine. If it's flowed on the surface for any distance at all, then you should purify it.

I often drink from mountain springs when backpacking. I carry a filter and/or purification tablets for drinking water from streams and rivers, but I don't bother to purify spring water.

You can't drink the water in the USA without getting horribly sick. Go out into the woods and drink some spring water. You're at risk of getting some nasty bacteria.

The water where in USA, which is a rather large and diverse country? And at how big of a risk?

I'm not afraid to drink unpurified water from streams in the woods here in Sweden (and no, I don't include the stream in the wood next to the local petrochemical industry in that), and have managed to do it for over 30 years without getting noticeably sick from it, as have many others.

On the other hand, I can't breathe the air here in Sweden without getting nasty viruses, as my current common cold, and the many sim

Most Homo Sapiens cannot safely drink water that hasn't been purified anymore.

Purification is needed isn't because Homo Sapiens can't survive without, but because we have to many people and to little natural grown resources. Some hundred thousand years ago you had far fewer humans and thus could simply go around and search for wild growing food and clean water, if you try that with thousands or millions of people in a rather small area, you quickly have exhausted all natural grown resources.

Exhibit A being the indigenous population that survives just fine drinking the water there.

No, they don't. I lived in Mexico for two years, and except in locations where the water is purified (or from a spring), Mexicans do not drink their water without boiling or otherwise purifying it. That's the reason that Mexicans drink so much water with fruit juice in it -- the flavoring from the fruit covers the flat taste of water that has been boiled.

That said, that doesn't mean there is no naturally-occurring pure water in Mexico or elsewhere. There's quite a bit. Not enough to support our needs,

You make boiling water sound like an absolute necessity, I don't know what part of the world you are from but I have personally drunk unboiled water from rivers, lakes, snow and somehow survived.
In other words you are full of shit

Better to be "full of shit" than having it running out of you like a waterfall.

As someone who has had Amoebiasis (from tap water no less), and spent pretty much 3 weeks on antibiotics sat in the bathroom doubled up in pain and everything I either ate or drank passing right through my system and out the other end in 5 minutes, I can tell you it's no joke.

AFAIK, cooked meat actually is a lot easier to digest. Also, the argument that raw vegetables are more nutritious ignored the fact that the nutrients tend to be more bioavailable after cooking. So, while cooking may destroy some nutrients, it also unlocks a lot more so that your body generally winds up being better nourished by the "nutrient-poor" cooked version. See how long you can live on raw potato if you don't believe me. I imagine you'd give up pretty quick. (Even ignoring the taste.) OTOH, a hu

Cite? I can't find any support for that idea, and can find some apparently-respectable arguments that say the opposite, that heating meat decreases digestibility.

See how long you can live on raw potato if you don't believe me. I imagine you'd give up pretty quick. (Even ignoring the taste.) OTOH, a human can live for a decent amount of time on cooked potatoes.

Again, do you have any reference for this? I can't find any sources that indicate that raw potatoes don't provide the same nutrients as cooked. Plenty that talk about how most of the nutrients are in the skin, of course.

The major part of potato carbohydrate is present as starch. The digestibility of cooked and uncooked starches from various foods including potato has been reviewed by Dreher et al. (1984), who placed potato starch in the group of least digestible food starches. There have been various experiments in which raw potato starch was fed to humans and caused symptoms such as violent stomach cramps (McCay et al., 1975), and such preparations cause caecal hyperotrophy and death in rats (El-Harith et al., 1976). The latter effects were subsequently attributed to the resistance of potato starch to digestion by pancreatic amylase (Walker & El-Harith, 1978), and were lost when the starch was gelatinized.

Cooking either peeled or unpeeled potatoes increases the digestibility of potato starch. The results of a study in vitro with pancreatic amylase into the effects of cooking potatoes on starch digestibility (Hellendoorn et al., 1970) are shown in Figure 4.5. Raw starch was barely digested; partly cooked starch from potatoes heated in water at 70 C for 20 min and cooled immediately was incompletely digestible, and the digestibility of the starch increased with cooking time.

When it comes to meat, however, the literature seems to support your contention that the tissues of raw meat are equally if not more digestible than cooked meats in most cases. However, raw meat is sometimes harder to chew, which can make a sizeable difference. (Sometimes it is not harder to chew; it depends on the meat. Organ meats are not as tough as muscle meat; chicken is not as tough as beef.) If the calories expended in chewing up the meat exceed the digestion benefits of the raw meat, then cooking t

The podcast episode Richard Wrangham - Rediscovering Fire [pointofinquiry.org] discusses the issue. As far as I remember basically cooking makes food easier to chew and increases its calories. Thus we get more energy, while at the same time saving a lot of time from the chewing.

Interesting. Google turns up a lot of articles that indicate that Wrangham's hypothesis is not widely accepted by other anthropologists, but perhaps that's because it's a new idea. I'm not completely convinced, though it bears watching.

I should mention, because some of the responses to my posts seem to make some incorrect assumptions about me, that I'm not a "raw foodist", nor do I have any inclination that way. My argument wasn't that cooking is bad, or that raw foods are healthier, just that cooking

There's no argument that if we were to have all technology/tools removed and even lose our ability to create primitive tools the human carrying capacity of the earth would be at most a few million, maybe only a few hundred thousand. So I guess you could say that 99.99% of us are "cyborgs".

If you make the definition of "cyborg" so broad as to include any basic tool use (as Kevin Kelly does) then the term loses it's usefulness, IMHO. It's actually pretty hard to define the word. I'd want to include active prosthetics such as myoelectric limbs and cochlear implants but not artificial limbs that aren't directly controlled by the nervous system or sensors that merely modify, filter or enhance stimulus for an existing sense organ (I don't think wearing night-vision goggles makes you a cyborg). I t

So you'd limit "cyborg" to only those systems that include a direct machine-nerve interface? Seems pretty restrictive. You'd even exclude neuromancer-like mirrorshades, since they're essentially surgically implanted night vision goggles. You'd exclude most of the existing powered prostheses, which are controlled by shoulder or stump motion. No myoelectric limbs have a direct neural interface, but use EMG (if they use any biopotential signal at all), which is a neural signal amplified by residual muscle.

I wouldn't want to be that restrictive. By "directly controlled by the nervous system" I was trying to make the distinction between something operated by conventional means such as manual controls and something operated more directly but I don't think it should require a direct neural interface necessarily. So prostheses operated by stump motion would be included.

I look around for some links, but to think that meat uncooked is as energy efficient as meat cooked is just wrong. Beyond that, there is no lower animal that prefers uncooked to cooked. I expect this last claim has not been exhaustively tested, but for apes it has been tested. Hah, this was trivial to find:http://pdfcast.org/pdf/cooking-and-grinding-reduces-the-cost-of-meat-digestion

There is a particular difficulty in your general "we do not quite need tech"..Last I heard "we" had fire 4 meg years ago, b

For all the sci-fi fantasy and the "we all are" cyborg nonsense, some of us living among you ARE cyborgs. Maybe not as exciting as a Borgified Picard, but without computer implants and mechanical augmentation we wouldn't be alive (and some have advantages as a result).

You have ignored the obvious: this thread is about cyborgs, which are part man part machine (implanted computer is implied). You're talking about 21st Century pen-pals.

This "cell phones and social networking make us cyborgs" stuff is just a childish attempt to jump on a fantasy's bandwagon. Cyborgs are cool, so you want to be one and proceed to extrapolate the notion to non-sequiturs to your satisfaction. No, you're not a cyborg because you have an iPhone and a Facebook account any more than having a telegr

Just out of curiosity, why is her age surprising? Did you think she was younger or older?

She's only been acting for eight years. She seems younger than 29 because she's so quiet and shy and a bit socially awkward because of her history of shyness. When she first came to Los Angeles, she had to take assertiveness courses. I find her amazing for being able to do what she does despite being so shy, as well as for her amazing physical abilities.

Yep. I have dental implants (titanium/ceramic composite teeth screwed into the skull) and a titanium plate with six screws in my arm. It may not be electronic, but I do have artificial replacement parts.

I wasn't saying that this is the type of stuff that Slashdot is all about. I was more implying that Slashdot (or, more specifically, this article) is a collection of people writing on the internet (bloggers, if you will) publishing their opinions on cyborgs on a barely readable website (ok, Slashdot is fairly legible once Firefox recovers from the initial loading but it's a joke so a little artistic license is allowed). Then again you're mature enough to recognise a joke so it must be that I'm misinterpreti

Judging from the article and "50 Posts" web site, this group's definition of "Cyborg" is broad enough to be equivalent to Richard Dawkins' notion of the "Extended Phenotype" ( http://amzn.to/cbSmTo [amzn.to] or many online hits ). Or perhaps to a second order recursion of the EP. The reach of our genes extends outside our somatic selves to the mechanisms we build with our tool-wielding hands. These mechanisms (perhaps themselves crypto-biological) are then candidates for tinkering within our soma - a prosthetic ha

I'm probably not the first to note the similarity of the paper's title to that cliché about rock stars and their groupies. One has to wonder how much the authors were influenced by the Zeitgeist [wikipedia.org] of the sixties, the so-called Flower Power era.

Still it makes for an interesting read that shows how much we already knew about space before Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn finally reached low earth orbit. Maybe a doped astronaut isn't such a bad idea, getting high in the high of space.

... in its original meaning (the science of regulatory systems). Without reacting to external stimuli and changing it s internal and sometimes external environment towards more favorable conditions, life would not exist.

Cybernetics is about mechanical/electronic devices just like astronomy is about telescopes.

I have a condition called otosclerosis - the membrane that the last ear-bone goes through to connect to the cochlea turns to bone. As a result, that last ear-bone stops moving = all three bones stop moving = you go deaf.

They drilled a hole in the membrane, and put a titanium-steel rod in place of the last bone.

The upshot? I can now hear again, but I have to fight the urge to find and kill Sarah Connor.

"Steve Austin, astronaut; a man barely alive". Richard Anderson (in character as Oscar Goldman) then intones off-camera, "Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man; better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.